If you will permit me a cliché during this indulgent time of year, life is about little things. I only recall one gift that I received last Christmas, but I remember cigars with a neighbor on a chilly night before Thanksgiving nine years ago like it was last week. Or I think I do, as memory is varnished with nostalgia and the memory of the memory, fossilizing into the mythology that I carry around as my idea of life. This time of year, we share our prized memories like, well, greeting cards. That’s the magic of the holidays.
Great holiday movies are in touch with how we carry our memories, and few are as intoxicated with our recollections and mythologies as Tyler Taormina’s “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” an instant Christmas classic. It is all about vibe, and manages to skirt the nagging issue of most holiday movies: the boring plots that we pretend to care about in order to enjoy the fun bits and remember where we were the last time that we watched them. Taormina taps into that amber of memory without bothering with the nonsense. The last film that I can remember boasting such an accomplishment is Sofia Coppola’s sad and lovely Netflix special “A Very Murray Christmas.”
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is set on the titular night on Long Island in the early aughts, as the sprawling Balsano family assembles for their party. There’s no exposition, as Taormina permits us the illusion of being thrust into the party and gathering information for ourselves. There are several uncles and in-laws, many children, a couple of aging matriarchs, a dozen bored teenagers, and a bounty of food and holiday music. Taormina conjures an unusual tone; the broadness of the characterizations, especially of the uncles, suggests the caricatures of a sitcom, except that the filmmaker manages to satirize the bigness of the characterizations and take them seriously at the same time.
These guys with their eyebrows and their sweaters and their jackets that might be Members Only will crease their brows and scrunch their faces and prime you for cartoonishly cantankerous behavior only then to say something subtle and poignant. One of the most bearish and seemingly macho uncles of the bunch, the kind of guy that a lesser movie would make sport of for his working-class roots, is revealed to be chipping away at a novel, which he hands to one of the teenagers for feedback.
Late in the film, as the party succumbs to alcohol and melancholia, another member of the family finds the novel and starts to read it aloud, her ridicule giving way to reverie as the surprising power of the writing takes hold of the group. Imagine if the cartoon characters of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” started airing real regrets and longings. That’s the startling effect of watching “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
The party is the central protagonist, an animal of its own, and it stands as one of the great parties in cinema. The blasts of color, the painterly blurs of light, the emotional ambiguities and ironies, and the considerable formal skill of the candy-colored cinematography and snaking camera suggest, among other movie memories, the parties of Martin Scorsese’s cinema, especially that frenzied Christmas that presages the fall at the end of “Goodfellas.” The casting of Francesca Scorsese, Martin’s daughter, as one of the young adults does not seem incidental. Neither does the presence of Sawyer Spielberg, Steven’s son, as one of the town’s misfits. Scorsese’s antic, anarchic energy, and Spielberg’s haunted and highly qualified nostalgia, coexist in Taormina’s canvas.
Taormina captures how excitement and disappointment are conjoined this time of year, how quickly the anticipation of ‘something different might happen this time’ gives way to ‘this is how it always is,’ which by next year might be rewritten as more nostalgia. The boisterous noise of the party gradually becomes claustrophobic, as it always seems to do when we stay at a celebration past its sell-by date.
The film’s best sequence is worthy of Taormina’s various sources of inspiration. The Balsanos play a home movie and the camera does something that we often wish we could do when watching footage of the past: it enters into the past space, exploring a wedding, savoring the nooks, peeking around corners that the tape itself couldn’t reveal. Taormina and cinematographer Carson Lund open a fissure up in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” collapsing eras the way that we collapse our histories of ourselves when we look back on what we’ve done and how we’ve felt, especially around the holidays.
A tradition this time of year, after the family-driven white elephants of the Thanksgiving season have been cluttering theaters for a month, is Christmas counterprogramming for adults who see cinema as something other than a device for babysitting children. Two of the more notable entries in this sweepstakes this year are Helina Reijn’s “Babygirl” and Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu.” Both have received considerable press, much of it admiring, though I think you’re better off staying at home and digesting your Christmas dinner and leaded eggnog with “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
“Babygirl” follows Romy (Nicole Kidman), the CEO of a blossoming Amazon-type company, as she enters into an affair with a younger intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), which jeopardizes her rarefied bougie existence with the children who hate her and the husband (Antonio Banderas) whose empathy terminally bores her in the sack. Get this: Samuel demeans Romy and she likes it! She enjoys experiences that don’t jibe with her bona fides as a capitalist who, like the film itself, hides behind feminist platitudes! A movie that asks us to consider the possibility that we are more than our sanctimonious sociopolitical bromides! Except, not really: the film is a sex positive erotic thriller that testifies to the need for communication in a long-term relationship. Hot, right?
This is an erotic thriller for our fraught, nervous times, I guess. It says obvious things so obviously, and is so complacent about its obsession with status and money, that the critics’ treatment of the film as a hot potato is embarrassing. The legitimately erotic “Secretary,” with an all-in performance by the perpetually underrated Maggie Gyllenhaal, handled this kind of material with more gusto 20 years ago. So did Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman Returns.” So did Adrian Lyne’s similarly-plotted “Unfaithful,” with its extraordinary performance by Diane Lane, who allowed you to experience the shock of a woman feeling erotic pleasure for the first time in eons.
The idea of Nicole Kidman in an erotic thriller for the art crowd is a cliché of its own at this point. Kidman was startling in “Eyes Wide Shut” and revelatory in “Birth,” an intentionally unlikeable movie that features her most vulnerable performance. But she’s too self-guarded now to shock us in “Babygirl.” All I see is a celebrity updating her CV. If I sound unfairly glib, it’s because I know that “Babygirl” is going to gobble up the attention that Catherine Breillat and Léa Drucker should have received for this year’s actual great and daring sexual thriller “Last Summer.”
I don’t have it in me to summarize the plot of “Nosferatu,” it is “Dracula” again, and slowly. A story that’s been adapted to the screen hundreds of times live or dies on style. The 1922 F.W. Murnau had wormy intensity and an iconic rat-like monster. The 1979 Werner Herzog had flaky comedy. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 “Dracula,” which Eggers leans on heavily here, had operatic romanticism.
By contrast, Eggers has no new ideas. The film is blue-gray tones and gothic shadows, old castles, and virtually unspeakable old English dialogue. The creature, played by Bill Skarsgård, is a letdown. The presence of Willem Dafoe, who now hams it up it in a half dozen movies a year, only reminds us that we should be watching him in another movie that’s in dialogue with Murnau: “Shadow of the Vampire.”
When are we allowed to admit that Robert Eggers might not be the big deal that some people hoped for? He’s a specialist in anal-retentive, atmospheric movies with no pulse. “Nosferatu” is for those too committed to the Eggers narrative to notice the lack of originality. It’s accomplished, yes, but monotonous and devoid of poetry.
For your evil Christmas needs, stick with Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas” (1974).
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is now streaming on demand. “Babygirl” and “Nosferatu” will be in theaters everywhere on Christmas day.
